Cupid in Africa

by Percival Christopher Wren

While Hall bathed, Bertram went in search of Captain Brent of the Coolie Corps.

Dinner that night was a vain repetition of yesterday’s, save that there was more soup and cold bully-beef gravy available, owing to the rain.

The roof of the banda consisting of lightly thatched grass, reeds, twigs, and leaves, was as a sieve beneath the tropical downpour. There was nothing to do but to bear it, with or without grinning. Heavy drops in rapid succession pattered on bare heads, resounded on the tin plates, splashed into food, and, by constant dropping, wore away tempers. By comparison with the great heat of the weather, the rain seemed cold, and the little streams that cascaded down from pendent twig or reed were unwelcome as they invaded the back of the neck of some depressed diner below.

A most unpleasant looking snake, dislodged or disturbed by the rain, fell with sudden thud upon the table from his lodging in the roof. Barely had it done so when it was skewered to the boards by the fork of Captain Tollward. “Good man,” said Major Manton, and decapitated the reptile with his knife.

“Just as well to put him out of pain,” said he coolly; “it’s a mamba. Beastly poisonous,” and the still-writhing snake was removed with the knife and fork that had carved him. “Lucky I got him in the neck,” observed Tollward, and the matter dropped.

Bertram wondered what he would have done had a small and highly poisonous serpent suddenly flopped down with a thump in front of his plate. Squealed like a girl perhaps?

Before long he was sitting huddled up beneath a perfect shower-bath of cold drops, with his feet in an oozy bog which soon became a pool and then a stream, and by the end of “dinner” was a torrent that gurgled in at one end of the Mess banda, and foamed out at the other. In this filthy water the Mess servants paddled to and fro, becoming more and more suggestive of drowned birds, while the yellowish khaki-drill of their masters turned almost black as it grew more sodden. One by one the lamps used by the cook and servants went out. That in the banda went out too, and the Colonel, who owned a tent, followed its example. Those officers who had only huts saw no advantage in retiring to them, and sat on in stolid misery, endeavouring to keep cigarettes alight by holding them under the table between hasty puffs.

Having sat—as usual—eagerly listening to the conversation of his seniors—until the damp and depressed party broke up, Bertram splashed across to his banda to find that the excellent Ali had completely covered his bed with his water-proof ground-sheet, had put his pyjamas and a change of underclothing into the bed and the rest of his kit under it. He had also dug a small trench and drain round the hut, so that the interior was merely a bog instead of a pool. . . .

Bertram then faced the problem of how to undress while standing in mud beneath a shower-bath, in such a manner as to be able to get into bed reasonably dry and with the minimum of mud upon the feet. . . .

As he lay sick and hungry, cold and miserable, with apparently high promise of fever and colic, listening to the pattering of heavy drops of water within the hut, and the beating of rain upon the sea of mud and water without, and realised that on the morrow he was to undertake his first really dangerous and responsible military duty, his heart sank. . . . Who was he to be in sole charge of a convoy upon whose safe arrival the existence of an outpost depended? What a fool he had been to come! Why should he be lying there half starving in that bestial swamp, shivering with fever, and feeling as though he had a very dead cat and a very live one in his stomach? . . . Raising his head from the pillow, he said aloud: “I would not be elsewhere for anything in the world. . . .”